Portrait Photography Skills, part 1

Good old window light provided the illumination for the shot of my daughter Emily above, see further pictures from this shoot in the April 2008 gallery, an east-facing window at about 11am, when no direct sunlight was streaming in. If your subject looks towards the light source then you get a catchlight in the eyes, which I think makes a huge improvement to a portrait. Having a neutral background also makes a big difference but don't forget to compensate for exposure if it's very light or dark.

Wedding Photography Skills - Exposure Compensation

Exposure compensation is a key skill for any photographer to acquire, and if you shoot weddings you'll find yourself using it a lot. Subjects framed by very bright sources of light are commonly encountered as people enter buildings and during the wedding meal, particularly when photographing the speeches - see the photo above taken at Chris and Sue's wedding. There are a number of options for dealing with this scenario, such as fill-in flash, centre-weighted or spot metering but I prefer to leave my camera in evaluative metering mode and manually compensate for exposure. You need to have a good 'feel' for your camera's exposure system to be spot-on, but shooting RAW gives you increased latitude for making exposure adjustments if you're not. I use a Canon EOS 5D which is programmed to spot classic under-exposure scenarios but I know that it will under-expose a shot such as the above. In this case I manually dialled in exposure compensation of +1 EV (exposure value) - in photographers' parlance I 'over-exposed by one stop', ie let in twice as much light as the camera thought would be required for a correct exposure. More about exposure will follow.

Window light is pretty good too!

I've spent quite a few posts talking about using flash light but window light is pretty good too, particularly when the sun is not directly streaming in through the window.  It's for this reason that painters have always favoured studios with north-facing windows. The picture above was taken at Johanna & Jeremy's wedding in Sandwich on Saturday and uses only window light.

Wedding photography at the Guildhall, Sandwich, Kent

Had great fun photographing Johanna & Jeremy's wedding at the Guildhall, Sandwich yesterday. I knew that it would be very dark inside, that the ceilings were low and that the oak walls would be highly reflective, so I knew I wasn't going to be bouncing flash. I also thought that I might be doing a lot of close-up portrait shots which test my homemade diffusers (David's photography blog: Using flash, part 3) to the limit as it's difficult to avoid hotspots. Since I use my Lastolite EzyBox for studio-style portrait photography at home, as it does a great job of softening flash light, I thought why not mount it on the camera? I therefore ordered a Manfrotto 233B flash bracket from Speed Graphics, one of my favourite online photographic retailers. It's not a discreet set-up (see shot above) but the results are stunning - check out the softness of the light illuminating the poor Nikon user below (joke - Canon please respond to the gauntlet laid down by the Nikon D3).

So it's quite heavy and it does raise a smile from wedding guests but the results mean that I shall be using it again. Check out a small, untweaked selection of Johanna and Jeremy's wedding photographs to see more examples.